Age of Product's Food for Thought of January 24th, 2016 covers: Minimum viable products best practices, the misallocation of talent for yet another on-demand service, how not make irrelevant products, agile meets "good enough" philosophy, agile estimation techniques, what is technical debt, the failure of side-projects, patterns of disruption, the year of WeChat commerce, scaling a product from the niche to the masses, and Silicon Valley's unicorn valuation problem.

Yevgeniy Brikman: A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process

It’s the same story again and again. First, a team comes up with an idea. Next, they build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a proof of concept, spending a lot of time arguing about which features to include or exclude from the MVP. Finally, if the MVP works well, they plan on building the full, mature, stable product.

Nikkel Blaase (via Co.Design): How To Avoid Making Products No One Wants

Product thinking gives designers the ability to build the right features for the right people. It helps solidify understanding of the user experience as a whole; not purely as the design of features. It makes sure designers tackle real user problems and reduces the risk of building something nobody wants.

Graham Lea (via Medium): Are You Being Too Agile?

Agile turned me from a chronic futurist into a raging pragmatist, which was quite a turnaround. I now often refer to myself as “a reformed perfectionist”, as I really do have an innate desire to do everything immaculately, but through learning how useful software can be built one highest-priority step at a time.

I’ve come to realise that “good enough for today” is a great motto for most facets of life.

Chris Messina (via Medium): 2016 will be the year of conversational commerce

Nearly a year ago today, I wrote a post inventorying the forebears to what I believe has become the dominant trend of consumer computing apps in 2016, a trend that I dubbed Conversational Commerce and have tracked with the hashtag #ConvComm.

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Published by

Stefan Wolpers

Stefan — based in Berlin, Germany — has been working for 12+ years as agile coach, ScrumMaster and Product Owner. He is an XSCALE Alliance XBA Coach (XBAC) as well as a member of Scrum Alliance (CSP, CSPO, CSM). He is also a certified LeSS practitioner (CLP). He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, mainly for startups, including a former Google subsidiary.